


Stone, Sky, and Sea

by RurouniHime



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Auror Partners, Friends to Lovers, HP: EWE, Harry-centric, Hiking, M/M, Pining, Post-Hogwarts, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 18:30:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5015488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry's got to get out of here.</p><p>(In which the Wizarding Saviour wanders about Oop North, tries to escape his partner, and fails miserably.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone, Sky, and Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nenne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nenne/gifts).



> This fic is written for Nenne, whose birthday, in spite of the fact that it is the SAME AS MINE, I somehow forgot. (I mean, what.) (!!!)
> 
> Nenne, happy, happy (belated) birthday! With much love, and in honor of the grand adventure I just returned from, I give you Harry and Draco.

_On Wednesday_

 

On Wednesday, Harry decides he’s going.

“I’m going,” he tells Kingsley, and shuffles his feet like the boy he used to be. “For seven days.”

Kingsley stacks his parchment, then sits back and eyes Harry head to toe. “Take seventeen. Hell, take seven weeks.”

“I don’t need seven weeks.” The wall’s not that long, or he’s not that slow a walker—whichever, a week is plenty.

“But maybe you _want_ seven weeks.” Kingsley is back to his papers, scratching with a quill while directing the filing of reports in the corner.

“I—”

“Harry,” Kingsley sighs. “People are starting to talk about how I don’t allow you to take your vacation days.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Harry says, indignant. He thinks a moment. “Two weeks.”

“Done.” Kingsley Accios the form and signs off in the same flourish. “Make sure you arrange with Draco to—”

“Could you arrange with Draco?”

Kingsley looks up and scans Harry again. Harry scratches his head, feeling very tired, suddenly.

“It’s just, it occurs to me I really need to be off. It’s half-five already. Lots to do if I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Alright.” And then Kingsley watches him walk out of his office, watches him all the way down the hall. When Harry passes the untidy double desk he shares with his partner—his partner who is not here—Kingsley is still watching.

 

**********

   
_Day One – Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Heddon-on-the-Wall_

 

He Apparates into the Newcastle Ministry as early as the fires are lit, catches a bus to Wallsend, and starts at nine-forty-five AM, when they’re just opening the museum. Otherwise, the fort is deserted, the streets beyond the gates empty. Harry buys a map, and then a passport on a whim, gets his Segedunum stamp, and heads up the path, his backpack snug to his spine.

He walks beside gentle twists of river and the jumbled and colorful flats that line the docks. He manages the Quayside by lunch, just in time to watch the bridge rise into a glittering vee to allow for a water taxi. It’s a beautiful day, sunny and fresh. People ride bikes up and down the quay, people bump into each other while holding coffees, people smile and tap their feet to the music of buskers. Harry gets outside the city proper and, because the trail is under construction, has to divert along a noisy motorway that makes him want to punch someone. He gets angry at blond toffs everywhere, fumes as he slogs through exhaust and tar-stink, mutters when he finally climbs up a slope back to the trail, and wonders what the hell he thinks he’s doing here anyway.

It takes a quiet grassy hill and a woman who smiles as she jogs by for Harry to forgive his partner of four years for being oblivious to things he couldn’t possibly be aware of. 

Harry walks and walks and walks, and his feet _hurt,_ and by the time he passes the ritzy bits of Lemington, the café in Newburn, and the country cottages beyond Ryton, he has lapsed into that wistful sadness he has become well acquainted with. But it’s better that he left. This is a cleansing kind of punishment, for allowing himself to drag along after someone he’ll clearly never have. It’s dogged going, all this pavement, and it’s past seven by the time he staggers up a god-awful hill into the town of Heddon-on-the-Wall.

First day. Fifteen bloody miles. He exchanges frazzled pleasantries with the bloke who runs the pub, and decides not to think about it. He eats dinner instead. He wobbles down the road to his hostel. He takes a shower, stretches a body that feels doubled over with palsy, and goes to bed.

 

**********

   
_Day Two – Heddon-on-the-Wall to Chollerford_

 

At the bit of wall that Heddon boasts, Draco Malfoy is waiting.

“Fine stir you kicked up,” Draco sniffs. He pushes off the fence post he was leaning against and hoists his backpack higher on his frame. “Couldn’t be bothered to wait till I got back to the office?”

His pack’s all wrong. Harry takes hold of one strap and adjusts the other, pulls the pack up at the shoulders and tugs Draco’s belt tight around his hips. Draco glares at him, bemused, as he works.

Finally, Harry steps back. Draco gives his pack a hitch, fingering the new tension of the straps. “Thank you. I think.”

“What are you doing here, Draco?”

“Should have thought that was obvious to someone of your smarts.”

Harry looks at him silently. Draco stares right back.

“Well, come on, Potter,” he finally declares. “This wall’s not going to walk itself.”

There are a lot of sheep pastures today. Draco gripes about the newly shorn hay, makes summary judgments about the three types of stile they are obliged to traverse between paddocks, and drags Harry down a private road against his will to get a look at Halton Castle.

“We’re going to get run off.”

“Sod off, we’re not.” Draco shades his eyes beneath waving trees. “People come here all the time.”

“And I’m sure the owners love that.”

“Potter, for Salazar’s sake, you’d think you’d never heard of Apparating.”

“You can’t do it,” Harry states. “Not here. Aura’s too strong.”

Draco glances beadily at him, then turns subtly in place. Clears his throat and turns again. Huffs. “So that’s why I can’t lighten this blasted pack.”

“You could head that way,” Harry points, “to Hallington, and you can Apparate from there just fine. Back to London, even.”

Draco’s nostrils flare. He meets Harry’s gaze long enough to send Harry’s eyes flicking away. “That’s alright. I think I can manage a stroll in the country.”

Draco has managed far worse under pressure in far more grating situations. Still— “I’ve reserved a bunkhouse for the night.”

He swears he hears Draco shiver. But when he looks back, his surprise companion is meandering toward the path again, eyes on the massive ditch flanking where the wall is now buried by road.

“Bloody fuck,” said companion gripes four hours later as he peels his socks from his feet. The bunkhouse is airy and sparse, but there are beds and sleeping bags, and the promise of a full breakfast come morning. That’s all Harry cares about. 

Well…

“Here.” He kneels down by Draco’s reddened feet and then finds he’s not up to taking the initiative. He offers his first aid kit instead. “Put some plasters on the hot spots.”

“How on Godric’s green earth did you manage a second day of this?”

Harry wrestles his own boot off, wincing, and shows Draco his heavily taped foot. With new blisters forming.

“Ah.”

“Use the tape in the morning.”

“I don’t suppose a spell would take?” Draco mutters, but doesn’t pursue a response. It’s just as well; Harry’s going to have a hell of a time hobbling down to the showers if he wants to be done before Draco shows up in the stall next to him.

 

**********

   
_Day Three – Chollerford to Housesteads_

 

“Potter, you are out of your bloody Muggle-born mind.”

Harry’s beginning to think he is. His glasses are a foggy mess, his backpack is half soaked despite the waterproof shell, and he thinks he’s got actual sheep slop in his right boot. The only reason he’s not utterly drenched is the state-of-the-art rain gear covering him from ankle to crown. Slightly more surprising is the even more expensive rain gear Draco pulled out two hours earlier.

“Look, though,” Harry pants, shrugging off his hood in spite of the downpour. It’s humid under all these layers; he’s sweating buckets. “The wall.”

“Oh, good. A bloody wall. I’ve never seen one of these before.”

Harry sighs. “A nineteen-hundred-year-old wall.”

“Eighteen hundred and ninety three, actually.” Draco approaches the low-lying stone and touches it with one not-so-irreverent finger. “And that’s if you count the commissioning year. Not the year it was finished.”

“This part could be the very first section they built,” Harry retorts, rubbing a hand soothingly over the closest stone. The magic hums out to greet him. “You don’t know.”

“Highly unlikely,” Draco sniffs.

The rain lets up around two, the storm sweeping in behind to ambush the hikers they passed going the other way, and they eat lunch in the middle of a pasture, sitting on their rain jackets instead of sheep shit. After that, it’s only a mile to Housesteads Fort.

“This has got to be the most inhospitable posting in the entire history of military engineering,” Draco announces, staring across the crags from which they’ve just come down. 

Harry frowns at all the green grass, the achingly stunning view. “It’s not _that_ bad.” 

“Think of the winter, Potter.”

Harry does. “Alright,” he concedes, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “In the top ten.”

They wander the fort until four-thirty. Harry takes videos with his digital camera specifically because Draco grumbles about it, and feels both melancholy and elated at the way it all tugs at his chest. 

Then Draco calls a taxi.

“We’re not technically on the wall anymore, Potter.”

“But…”

Draco blinks owlishly from within his rain hood. “You said it yourself. Bardon Mill’s a good four miles out of the way.”

“It’s not that late, yet,” Harry tries. Draco’s damp hair is curling gently against his forehead. His grey eyes match the tumbling clouds above, and his lips are red in the cold air. Harry wants to brush the rain from his eyebrows.

Draco shrugs and turns down the road toward where he directed the car to meet them. “You’re the one who reserved the bed and breakfast.”

Harry struggles after him, fighting with a twisted backpack strap. “It was the only one I could get!”

The cab takes them a long way off the beaten path, down a road that makes Harry a bit sick at the thought of having wanted to walk it, and drops them off at the door of a stately house with lots of windows. Their room turns out to be the upper floor of a converted coach house, and when the door opens, Harry takes a full minute to understand what he’s looking at.

“Oh, thank the Founders,” Draco moans, shedding his boots and jacket, and throwing himself onto the nearest of two lush beds. It must be a feather mattress, the way he sinks down into it. There are tea and cakes on the table under skylight windows, a massive en suite with a glass-enclosed shower, and pillows a mile deep. The tingle of house-elf magic lingers like a rich aroma. “Potter, I’ve changed my mind. You can make _all_ the sleeping arrangements for me that you want.”

Harry drags his eyes away from splayed arms encased in black wool, slender hips, a stomach bared by the stretch of Draco’s spine, and gets to work on the snarl that is his bootlaces.

 

**********

   
_Day Four – Housesteads to Greenhead_

 

It comes to Harry, amidst the most paralyzingly sublime scenery he has ever seen, that he will have to come to terms with it all anyway: that Draco Malfoy will go through Harry’s life without wanting Harry the way Harry wants him. That his partner has come even here into the austere north, and that despite Harry’s attempt to gain much needed distance (and perspective), when he gets back to London, he will have to face this anyway. Resolution is not accomplished in a week. Not in two weeks. And it doesn’t matter if he gets away from Draco or not because eventually he will have to fold back into the man’s sphere.

“Merlin, Potter, do look less like you want to leap off this crag, would you?” Draco has stolen Harry’s camera and, as he is a fast learner, takes about a hundred photos of the vast and rolling stretches of wall. “On three. One, two—There we are. Can you believe only yesterday we were on that outcropping back there?”

It _is_ hard to fathom. Below and behind them in the cup of two hills is a majestic sycamore. Not an hour ago, they were atop the Holbank Crags and gaping again at the ingenuity of the Romans, tasting the spells still woven into the very rocks at their feet, charms that have not lost a lick of their potency.

Not ten minutes ago, Draco stood beneath that tree, poised where they crossed from north of the wall to south of the wall, his hands hooked into his shoulder straps. His face was lax and distant, his smile private, his cheeks aglow, and Harry had taken a picture then with his mobile. And regretted it terribly for capturing exactly what he would never have. 

They stop at the wall’s apex—somewhere around 345 metres—and Harry stands there tense and still with Draco behind him, rifling the top compartment of his backpack.

“Cadbury Daim. Double Decker… What on earth is a KitKat?”

“Try it.”

Their sandwiches thump to the ground lightly enough, and Harry hears the crinkle and snap as Draco follows instruction. A moment later, a pleased-sounding grunt. “Muggle, are they?”

“Magical sweeties wouldn’t taste right up here.”

Draco’s arm reaches round, offering two wafers far too near Harry’s mouth. Harry fixes on the slim bend of wrist as he takes the gift.

“One would think you had an obsession, Harry.”

He starts, and drops his pack to cover it. “With chocolate?”

“There are worse addictions.”

 _Yes,_ Harry thinks, gazing at Draco where he stands against the backdrop of green hills and thunderous sky. _There are._

Down and up, and down again. The air grows cool as the afternoon sinks, and then, on the slopes just past Caw Gap, a sparkle lances Harry’s eye and he stops fully, Draco bumping into him from behind.

“Fulbert’s filthy smalls, Potter, what is it now?”

“Look.” He points into the graying twilight at the shimmer of sea, still under the sun. Draco’s hand, at Harry’s hip to catch his balance, tightens.

“That where we’re headed?” he asks after a moment. The wind nearly whips the words away.

“Yes,” Harry breathes.

They’re late getting into Greenhead, told that the hot water’s not working at the hostel, and moved into the hotel. Draco drops into yet another luxurious bed with an ungodly moan, and Harry sits, eyes trained desperately on his blistered feet. His hip, where Draco gripped it hours ago, still feels cold and bare.

 

**********

   
_Day Five – Greenhead to Walton_

 

“You’ve gone and put us off the path,” Draco snaps.

Harry rakes drizzle from his hair and forces himself not to crumple the map. “There was an acorn on that sign. I swear I saw it.”

“Yet somehow, we’ve ended up on the Pennine Way. Give it to me.”

Harry does not. “It’s my walk,” he bites out. “I’ll find the way back to it.”

He can feel the pierce of Draco’s eyes through the rain.

It’s Harry’s fault, really. He’s been in a right mood since he woke up, and barely slept in the first place for the unexpected sense of loss. And Draco Malfoy’s temper has only ever needed the flick of a finger to send it jumping.

But all Harry feels is resentment. This _is_ his walk, his chance for a break, and Draco ruined it.

It’s only moments before they are back on the trail. There are cows aplenty today, a horse or two, and a young farm dog that follows them a worrisome way from home before loping back through the brush. Birdoswald is a welcome relief. They meander the grounds of the fort, then sit in the café drinking tea.

“These Reivers,” Draco says heavily, and Harry nods. He imagines a night woken to fires and shouting, the distressed lowing of cattle and the mad scramble to the secure upper floors.

“I’d get myself to safety,” Draco declares. “Sod the cows.”

“Would you really?” Harry says, and Draco nearly gives him a serious answer before noting his smirk.

“Decorum, Potter. You’ll scandalize the schoolchildren.” 

Toward Lanercost, there’s a rest hut with tea and snacks, an honesty box that jingles with coins, and a sea of thank you notes tacked to the rafters. Harry adds one, lets Draco sign their names, and finally remembers that he’s a much finer person when sadly wistful instead of bitter.

It’s not so hard to match Draco’s weary smile, then.

 

**********

   
_Day Six – Walton to Carlisle_

 

“There’s something wrong with your toe,” Draco says at Crosby-on-Eden.

“I know.” Harry grimaces. The thing is nearly purple with bruising, but if he’s tight with his laces, the pain is nothing but a dull hum.

“Ought to go off path for a bit.” Draco fingers his shoulder strap. His hat is on today, and blond hair peeks from beneath, framing his cheekbones. “Set a spell.”

“It’d never hold once we were back on the path.” Just as the stitching would fall from Draco’s torn trouser knee, were he to mend it. Just as the warming spells dissipated in the face of chilly Roman stone. “It’s just one more day.” 

Draco looks unsure. He falls in behind, and Harry feels eyes on his nape for an hour.

There is, in fact, no more Roman stone. The lengths here are red sandstone, buried away from the elements in order to preserve them. But the aura is a clout against Harry’s senses. For the last five days, the wand in his pack has felt like nothing but a child’s stick.

“The local sheepherding was worth it,” he ventures, limping down a bike path outside Rickerby, and Draco laughs.

“How in Merlin’s name can one county contain so much wool?”

It is indeed a mystery.

Carlisle is a big, bustling shock after days of quiet hamlets. They’re in time for Harry’s sixth passport stamp in the community centre café, and then, despite burning calves and arches, they end up at the castle on the hill. Three floors to the top of the keep. If Harry has to look at another set of stairs, he might just cut off his feet at the ankles.

One relief: “Thank Godric for you, Carlisle,” Draco proclaims, waving his wand over their dingy clothing in a cheery room overlooking a churchyard. The air still buzzes with the wall’s proximity, but after centuries, layer upon layer of residential magic can hold its own.

They step painfully outside in search of food and end up a mere two doors down eating Italian. Harry’s cheeks are hot with wind and sun, his lips chapped, his eyes at half mast over his plate of rigatoni.

“Why did you leave like that, Harry?”

He hates Draco then, for asking him now, over wine, over refinement and decadence, and amid a soporific warmth he can’t battle.

And so he lies. “Couldn’t be at work anymore.”

A strange look passes over Draco’s face. He toys with his wine flute. “You’re not leaving for good. Are you?”

Maybe he should. Harry gazes at Draco, helpless. How to tell him _‘You’re the reason I left’_? _‘The reason I can’t leave’_? 

Finally, he just sits back. “That’d be a right mess to throw on Kingsley.”

“Why walk Hadrian’s Wall?”

“There are things I’ve wanted to do. For a long while, ever since—Voldemort. It gets to a point where…” He can’t help but meet Draco’s eyes. “You have to do it. Or you have to let go of wanting to.”

He memorizes Draco’s features, his pale eyes and sharp chin and the smooth arc of his throat, suddenly sadder than he can recall. He’s not talking about the wall.

 

**********

   
_Day Seven – Carlisle to Bowness-on-Solway_

 

Harry walks fifteen miles from Carlisle to Bowness on a toe he’s convinced is broken. Every step is a stab, every creak of his pack frame sharp in his ears. He settles into a haze, staring ahead and forgetting to see. The sky is jewel blue. There are seagulls everywhere and salt on the back of Harry’s tongue. He limps doggedly across the Solway Firth, leaving the road whenever a car comes by. The cows have infiltrated now that the tide has receded. The asphalt is already dry and the sun beats down.

Draco falls behind, and they walk in tandem silence, staggered along the road with other distant-eyed hikers.

Between Glasson and Port Carlisle, Harry loses the acorn and walks with watering eyes through a shelter of trees. There is a defunct cement pier out on the firth, rusty-red with Scotland behind it. The woods close round, blocking all else from view, and Harry’s breath sinks into broken hisses. 

When he spills out onto a grassy park, he drops his pack and sinks down onto the lawn to wait. Ten minutes later, Draco follows suit, their arms bumping as he settles back. 

Eventually and without a word, they climb back to their feet.

Around a corner, and suddenly there’s a man with a set of signs that can show how far away Harry now stands from any city in the world. Harry takes a picture without caring, but Draco asks that the New York mileage be put up. 

“I visited there once,” he tells the man, “on business.”

Eighty-three miles to Wallsend. One mile to Bowness.

At just after four pm, they wander up a street, turn into an alley, and pass under a sign.

**WELCOME  
THE END OF HADRIAN’S WALL PATH  
AVE TERMINUM CALLIS HADRIANI AUGUSTI PERVINISTI**

There’s a small kiosk with historical information, and a lovely bird mosaic on the floor. Harry gets his last stamp, sighing as he pockets the passport, and Draco’s smile is wide and dazzling.

They make their way to their bed and breakfast. Their host tells them of a pair of boys last week who finished their walk, stayed the night, then promptly turned around and started back toward Newcastle.

“What, are they masochists then?” Draco says, and the woman laughs. Harry watches his partner and dully considers the word.

“I’d originally reserved you the twin as you requested,” she says, pointing out the kitchen and then leading them down the hall. “But we’ve two singles open if you’d rather use them.”

In the daze of Harry’s distraction, the pain from his feet and the sag of his muscles, Draco inserts smoothly, “No, that’s fine, thank you. We’ll take the double.”

“Because you could have your own rooms,” she says doubtfully. Draco smiles, disarming.

“Better save them. We passed a few other walkers who most definitely were not traveling together. Who knows if they’ve accommodations for the night?”

Harry is too exhausted, too hollowed to feel anything like dismay.

After dinner at the pub, he backtracks down the alley without warning. Draco follows in silence. The firth has filled with water again, endlessly reflecting the purple, pink, and blue sunset. Dark clouds streak through the color, and the lights of unknown towns in Scotland wink from the opposite shore.

He gazes out over the water for several minutes, trying to assimilate what he’s just finished, that he did it at all. It’s an ending, he decides, and then can’t go further with the thought, the dread is so great. Draco doesn’t make a sound, just waits until Harry turns away at last.

They go back to their room. Harry showers, his feet throbbing gratefully under the hot water. His toe is black and blue, but no longer sentenced to an eternity in his hiking boot, and that’s enough. He washes all the grime of the trail from his skin, and tries to wash the more ephemeral grit away, too. Finally, he’s able to put a face on the sour churn in his gut: they’re nearly due a new rotation at the Ministry, and when they are, Harry will request a change in partners.

He has to stop this. When he gets back, he will.

When he returns to the room, Draco is propped up in his bed, reading by lamplight. Harry wraps his injured toe as best he can, then crawls gratefully into the other bed, turns onto his side, and methodically pushes all thought from his mind. Behind him, Draco’s breathing becomes a heartbeat, the turning of each page a whisper. 

He’s a long way from sleep when the other bed creaks.

“Harry.” 

Harry hurts, drearily and inside where muscles don’t play a part. He can’t explain how he heard the bed frame but not the pad of feet across the space between them. He can’t explain anything about this week, or how he’ll simply go back to his life in another week, and pretend like he didn’t just give up on what he has wanted for longer than anything else.

Draco sits on the mattress behind him, not touching. Harry can see his shadow on the wall.

“Possibly you’re working under a misapprehension,” Draco says, then hesitates as though he has perhaps made the mistake. Fingers alight on Harry’s upper arm, the touch morphing slowly into a firm grip. Draco sighs. “And very probably, I’ve been selfish, and an idiot.”

Draco moves all at once, rising onto his knees and kneeling over Harry. He turns Harry’s face upward at the chin and dips his head as though to… Harry swallows. For an instant, the hurt blooms blindingly.

“Would you really leave because of me?” Draco whispers. 

Harry has no answer, no air. He stares up at his partner stupidly. _Can’t be happening._ “No,” he rasps. “I don’t—don’t know.”

“Why would you want me?” Draco breathes, brushing his lips over Harry’s with every word. “I am an arrogant arse. I take shortcuts, and I intrude where I’m least wanted. I ignore what’s right in front of my face.”

“Draco,” Harry tries, and loses it in a shuddering gasp. Draco turns him by the shoulder, slides a leg across to straddle Harry’s hips, and every motion is steady and smooth, a wave rushing inland. Draco pulls his own shirt over his head and his sleep trousers off his legs one by one, and Harry can do nothing but fix his hands to Draco’s muscled waist, rake his eyes over pale skin shadowed by the lamp.

“I don’t know what to do,” Draco whispers against his mouth. His hands skate Harry’s ribs full-palmed, all the way up. “I never know what to do with you. I snatch after you like a coveted toy. I insult you, and I belittle you, and I get angry when then you’re gone. Something takes you away from me and I don’t know how to behave.”

“Draco…” It’s all he can say. It’s a helpless sound; he barely recognizes it. Draco kisses him, a searching, devouring kiss, and Harry can only rise into it. Rise after it when Draco pulls away.

“Do you want me, Harry Potter?”

Harry shakes his head. He doesn’t want Draco. “I _love_ you.”

Draco stills, eyes wide. A hundred questions fly into the space between their noses. Harry is very aware of all the naked skin against him, kept at bay by the sheerest of blankets. Draco shakes his head, dazed. “Why?”

He’s forgotten why. More importantly, he has forgotten why not. Four years of partnership and everything before that, all held just beyond his reach. “Don’t do this,” Harry manages, his eyes burning. “Don’t, if you don’t…”

“What?” Draco curls back down. Brushes a rending kiss across Harry’s mouth. “Don’t mean it?”

“I really will leave,” Harry croaks, and can’t commit to a word of it.

Draco pulls the blanket from between them with one hand. “Then you won’t be leaving.”

He’d suspected Draco Malfoy was a capable lover. Heard it, painfully, from others. But he’d never been taken apart by him, bit by bit. Draco subjects every inch of his flesh to the attention of fingers, tongue, lips. The bare skin of his own body, when nothing else presents. He divests Harry of his shirt, his boxers, his thoughts, until Harry clutches Draco against him, desperate for him, all the words he’s kept quiet spilling from his lips unchecked. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Part of him is glad he won’t remember, come morning.

Draco eases them together, and then the ease flees utterly, replaced by raw, pointed thrusts, each one its own slow agony. Harry catches Draco’s face, can’t kiss him, can only witness the flare in his eyes, the way they can’t stop skating over his face, the way each push within his body is echoed by a catch in Draco’s voice, a noiseless gasp. Another thrust, another catch. Draco gasps Harry’s name, meets mouth to mouth, and steals what breath he has left from him.

Harry comes on an endless shudder with Draco’s hand on him, the bed creaking, and then Draco hitches uncontrollably, drags Harry to him with both hands and thrusts brokenly, too fast, until he goes rigid. Under Harry’s hands, Draco’s whole body shivers. He moans a slurred word into Harry’s neck, all vowels. Half kiss.

Harry comes down slowly, euphoria deluging his nerves. Draco’s skin is hot and damp, sweat running down his back between Harry’s fingers. Harry leans up and mouths Draco’s shoulder in a daze. Savors the taste.

“I’ve loved you for years,” Draco whispers. “I just knew I didn’t deserve you.”

It’s not about deserving. It’s about foundations laid and fortifications heaped, and after it’s all done, opening that gate anyway and giving yourself a chance at what you really want. Harry turns his nose into Draco’s throat and breathes him in. “I think we deserve each other,” he says.

Draco huffs, nearly a laugh. He noses into another kiss. Harry offers back everything he has.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone who is curious, I did walk Hadrian's Wall this September. It is indeed 84 miles from end to end. It was a beautiful, painful, absolutely worthwhile endeavor and I recommend everyone go visit even if you don't travel the entire length. It has long been a bucket list item for me, and though I've been told I am too young to have a bucket list, I figure if you start early, you get a lot more done. ^_^
> 
> A lot of the wall is gone these days (and some of it is purposely buried, just as Harry describes), but Day 4 makes _everything_ worth it. Fun facts:
> 
> 1) That potentially broken toe was my potentially broken toe. It was not, in fact, broken, for which I am thankful. But it's been three weeks since I got back and that sucker is still trying to become normal again.
> 
> 2) There truly is a gentleman with changeable signs in Port Carlisle, who will ask for a bit of "ale money" in return for mileage to your hometown and a lurvely photo to commemorate your accomplishment. ^_^
> 
> 3) My favorite fort is not mentioned in this story: Vindolanda lies a bit back from the wall itself, and had a sizable town around it. Housesteads could very easily be a miserable place to be stationed during a British winter, but gawd was it gorgeous up there. For info on Birdoswald, the Border Reivers, the bastle houses, and all other mentionings, I urge the circumspect use of Google.
> 
> 4) Bits 'n' bobs: There really is a god-awful hill up to Heddon. In contrast, there really is an amazing B&B in Bardon Mill. We really did accidentally wander onto the Pennine Way in the middle of a golf course. There really are a gazillion sheep in Cumbria. The Solway Firth really does spend much of its time underwater and you have to time your crossing. And finally, there really is a magical acorn that all hikers diligently worship as they toddle along.
> 
> 5) Not mentioned but certainly worth a giggle: The bus that runs along the inner sections of the wall is number AD122, the year Hadrian started building. Ah, British humor. I do love thee.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Stone, Sky, and Sea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13465347) by [limit_the_sky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/limit_the_sky/pseuds/limit_the_sky)




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